Counterfeit medicines are a fundamental security problem. Counterfeiting medication poses a tremendous threat to patient safety, public health, and the economy in developed and less developed countries. Current solutions are often vulnerable due to the limited security levels. We propose that the highest protection against counterfeit medicines would be a combination of a physically unclonable function (PUF) with on-dose authentication. A PUF can provide a digital fingerprint with multiple pairs of input challenges and output responses. On-dose authentication can verify every individual pill without removing the identification tag. Here, we report on-dose PUFs that can be directly attached onto the surface of medicines, be swallowed, and digested. Fluorescent proteins and silk proteins serve as edible photonic biomaterials and the photoluminescent properties provide parametric support of challenge-response pairs. Such edible cryptographic primitives can play an important role in pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting and other security applications requiring immediate destruction or vanishing features.

中文翻译：

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可食用的不可克隆功能。

假药是一个基本的安全问题。假药对发达国家和欠发达国家的患者安全，公共卫生和经济构成了巨大威胁。由于安全级别有限，当前的解决方案通常易受攻击。我们建议，对假冒药品的最高保护应是物理上不可克隆的功能（PUF）与剂量认证相结合。PUF可以提供具有多对输入质询和输出响应的数字指纹。剂量认证可以验证每个药丸，而无需移除识别标签。在这里，我们报告了可直接附着在药物表面，被吞咽和消化的剂量用PUF。荧光蛋白和丝蛋白可作为可食用的光子生物材料，并且光致发光特性为激发反应对提供了参数支持。这种可食用的密码基元可以在药物防伪和其他需要立即销毁或消失特征的安全应用中发挥重要作用。